Ahead of her time: E-commerce pioneer Julie Wainwright’s story of resilience and success

Look through an article about the dotcom bubble from the turn of the century and you will find a company called Pets.com high on the casualty list. Pets.com was an e-commerce business that sold pet food and other pet products online — something that doesn’t sound that remarkable now but was very forward-thinking at the time. Too forward thinking, as it turned out.

The concept for Pets.com was not a bad one. As Wired points out in an article written in 2014, it was just that its time had not yet come: “Even the Pets.com idea is looking mighty good. The basic notion that people wanted to buy pet food online and have it delivered to their homes turns out to be a sound one. Market research firm IBISWorld pegs it at a $3 billion market and a new generation of companies — Chewy.com, Petflow.com and Wag.com, to name a few — all making a go of it.” Read more

Fi Bendall - SmartCompany - 6 September 2018